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Fine Start to XC Season at Goodwood

Tuesday 1st October 2019

Fine Start to XC Season at Goodwood

We enjoyed excellent results (and unexpectedly dry weather and ground!) at the Sussex Cross Country Relay Championships  at Goodwood on September 28th. 

Special  thanks are due to all nineteen of our U13 and U15 runners -  who managed a better turnout than some of our older age groups. We also had a very healthy medal haul. Raphael Reed  won a very close 3-way finish to clinch silver for our U13 Boys. Our V45 Women ( including V60 Carol Webb)  claimed an excellent bronze medal place, whilst our V50 and V60 Men both claimed victory by huge margins, helped by gallant efforts from Steve Atkinson, Andy Bone and Phil Hampshire who all ran strongly despite carrying injuries. But the standout performance came unsurprisingly from our formidable U17 female trio of Milly Dickinson, Alice Wright and Poppy Palmer-Malins, who won U17 gold by over 2 minutes,  beating all but two of the female teams across all age categories in the process.

Our turnout, like that from other clubs, was patchy, and disappointingly we had no full male teams apart from our V50s and 60s, but a slow start to the cross country season is normal, and hopefully we will see many more Phoenix athletes in action when we return to Goodwood on October 12th for the first League race of the season. For any newcomers it is worth saying that Goodwood is an excellent cross-country course for competitors and spectators alike, with a good combination of open grassland and woodland tracks, relatively little mud and relatively manageable hills!